Paul McCartney was reluctant to try LSD, but he eventually decided to take the drug with John Lennon. It was not his first time taking it, but he thought it would be important to experience it with Lennon. He said the experience brought them together and reminded him of how close they were as friends. He also described it as “freaky.”
Paul McCartney tried LSD with John Lennon for the first time after a recording session
During a recording session, Lennon accidentally took LSD thinking it was an amphetamine. It didn’t take long for him to realize he wasn’t going to get any work done with The Beatles. McCartney walked Lennon home, and when they arrived, he decided to take LSD too.
“I thought, maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him,” he said, per Rolling Stone. “It’s been coming for a long time. It’s often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John’s on it already, so I’ll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or any of the guys.”
McCartney said it was a good experience, even if he didn’t like LSD as much as his bandmates.
“We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot,” he said. “Me and John, we’d known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other … And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away. John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip.”
Paul McCartney felt pressured by John Lennon to try LSD
Part of the reason McCartney wanted to try LSD with Lennon was because his bandmates had been pressuring him to try it. Lennon and George Harrison didn’t feel they could relate to their bandmates unless they tried it. McCartney said it went beyond peer pressure — he felt “fear pressure” to take LSD.
“I’d not wanted to do it, I’d held off like a lot of people were trying to, but there was massive peer pressure,” he said in the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “And within a band, it’s more than peer pressure, it’s fear pressure. It becomes trebled, more than just your mates, it’s, ‘Hey, man, this whole band’s had acid, why are you holding out? What’s the reason, what is it about you?’ So I knew I would have to out of peer pressure alone.”
McCartney tried LSD for the first time with a non-Beatles friend, but he knew it would be important to take it with Lennon.
The Beatles wrote an album inspired by LSD
Many of The Beatles’ albums took heavy inspiration from the substances they were using most frequently at the time.
“The final track on Revolver, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ was definitely John’s,” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “Round about this time people were starting to experiment with drugs, including LSD. John had got hold of Timothy Leary’s adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a pretty interesting book.”
